Saturday, December 12, 2009

DAY 3- 4:00 am Maddi wakes up from a nightmare and notices that the walls seem to be scintillating. She nudges the rest of us awake and we scrape away at a dirt crust on the walls, unearthing bright, metallic walls which are covered in more strange symbols. Maddi presses a symbol and a screen comes over the unglazed window. We find an intaglio of the eye figure and Kieran presses his amulet (which he found in the ossuary and remembers to mention it last minute) into the shape despite our warnings. The floor rumbles and blocks of limestone emerge from the ground, also covered in runes. We figure out that these are consoles when we find a palm-print identification scanner of a three-fingered hand which doesn't work to human hands. So Kieran mentions the deformed bones in the ossuary and suggests that we should go down. Him, Maddi and Haylee go down and Kim and I stay behind to do some investigating.

-4:20 am I'm sitting on the ledge of the unglazed window when I notice that Kim isn't there. Suddenly, a screen materializes on the wall; a map of the island which can magnify on an area where you tap. My curiosity aroused, I press a random button and the wall on the far side of the chamber opens up to a small adjourned room. I walk into the smaller chamber and see that on the wall are two depressions of bodies. One is the shape of a human and the other a shorter deformed body shape with a conical head. Joy-sticks protrude from the end of the arms, presumably for the hands to clutch. I press up into the human depression and grip the joysticks. The controls must have had a sensor on them, for as I fitted into the shape, a force-field-like screen came over me, covered in transparent symbols which seemed to be stuck in midair. I touched a symbol and te capsule shot up, out of the mountain, and into the sky. The pod decelerated until it was just hovering in the clouds. Below me, Matainui was the size of my palm. Using the joy-sticks, I managed to fly around the island. As I reached the pyramid again, I saw a figure climbing the tiers. It was Marek. Staying low among the pavilion of the forest, I watched Marek as he reached the top of the structure and clambered through the unglazed window.

- 4:50 am Marek hadn't come out yet and I guessed that he was talking to my group. I couldn't wait any longer so I decide to get back into the pyramid. I fly around, looking for the hole I came out of and finally find it hidden under the ferns. I lower the capsule into the shaft until I see the smaller chamber come up before my eyes. I step out of the human depression and walk into the bigger chamber to find the others and Marek talking. Marek leaves and I tell my group what had happened to me. They then tell me that Marek is going to come back the next day with his group . We come up with a diabolical plan to ditch them, which I don't feel so good about but we all agree that we don't want them joining us. Kieran is going to go into the forest the next day and, when Marek's group comes, is going to tell them that we are now camping in the forest. He'll lead them off and then make a run for it when they aren't looking.What a morning...

DAY 4

- 9:00am We wake up and watch Marek and his group using the GPS-like map. When we calculate that they're forty-five minutes away, Kieran leaves for the forest floor and I watch our stratagem unfold through the electronic map.

- 10:20 am Kieran comes through the unglazed window and we close it immediately. He tells us what happened even though we just saw it.

- 11:10 am We here knocking on the walls and shouting. It's Marek's group. We come up with a plan to lead them off using the capsule again but I say that I'm not doing it again because it makes me nauseous, so Kim volunteers and I teach her about the controls. We watch her fly out of the pyramid and linger in the sky as Marek's group follows her.

- 1:00 pm Finally, Kim arrives back in a shock. She tells us that she managed to lead them off where they wouldn't be able to find their way back but that in the sky there was a huge iridescent dome covering the island. She had gone through the bubble and found that the 'outside' was a ruined and extirpated terra firma. She had tried to get back into the comparable tranquility of the dome but the pod had just bounced off the surface. So she had travelled to the top of the bubble and slipped into a huge vortex. The capsule had been struck with lightning and shaken with thunder. She compares this experience with that of our arrival to Matainui. Then teh pod had fallen through the air and she had just managed to gain control and swurve towards the pyramid before plunging into the lake. We think about what this dome could be.